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Summary
Summary
Every Man Dies Alone
Author Notes
Hans Fallada is a pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen, who was born in Greifswald, Germany, in 1893.
Many of Fallada's works, including the posthumously published The Drinker, were about his life, which was rife with addictions and instability. Another subject of his works was his homeland Germany. Earlier works, including international bestseller Little Man, What Now?, show a Germany that would allow itself to become a Nazi nation under Hitler. Later works deal with the aftermath and guilt of this decision.
He died on February 5, 1947, in Berlin.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This disturbing novel, written in 24 days by a German writer who died in 1947, is inspired by the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, who scattered postcards advocating civil disobedience throughout war-time Nazi-controlled Berlin. Their fictional counterparts, Otto and Anna Quangel, distribute cards during the war bearing antifascist exhortations and daydream that their work is being passed from person to person, stirring rebellion, but, in fact, almost every card is immediately turned over to authorities. Fallada aptly depicts the paralyzing fear that dominated Hitler's Germany, when decisions that previously would have seemed insignificant-whether to utter a complaint or mourn one's deceased child publicly-can lead to torture and death at the hands of the Gestapo. From the Quangels to a postal worker who quits the Nazi party when she learns that her son committed atrocities and a prison chaplain who smuggles messages to inmates, resistance is measured in subtle but dangerous individual stands. This isn't a novel about bold cells of defiant guerrillas but about a world in which heroism is defined as personal refusal to be corrupted. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Grim, powerful epic portrait of life in Germany under Nazi rule, published shortly after the author's death in 1947 but never before available in English. Fallada was a bestselling novelist before the rise of the Third Reich, but during World War II he was hounded by the Gestapo and psychologically brutalized by Joseph Goebbels, who unsuccessfully tried to force him to write an anti-Semitic book. Sinking into alcohol and drug addiction, he was a broken man by the end of his life, and his final novel is shot through with his despair. Written in a 24-day rush, it was inspired by the real-life case of a working-class husband and wife who conducted a covert three-year propaganda campaign against the Nazi regime. Fallada's fictionalized version centers on Otto and Anna Quangel, who are driven to protest after learning that their only son has died fighting at the front. The protest is small and timid: Otto writes anti-Hitler messages on postcards that he distributes around Berlin, and the Quangels are never certain if they influence any hearts or minds. Nonetheless, they provoke the Gestapo. Fallada reveals a deep understanding of the agency's chain of command, its grisly abuses of power and the culture of fear it cultivated among German citizens. His hefty novel includes a host of characters, from hard-drinking reprobates and factory workers to judges and, in a poignant early passage, an elderly Jewish woman in the Quangels' apartment building who lives in a perpetual state of terror. Most of these people are archetypal to a fault: Otto Quangel rarely strays from a stance of stoic nobility, and the drunken, proud bloviations of Gestapo brass occasionally border on the absurd. The characters' fates are clearly telegraphed, yet Fallada keeps readers engaged with passionate prose that rushes events along at a thriller-like pace. And there's stark grandeur in the closing chapters, featuring a Nazi trial, an execution and death in prison. A very welcome resurrection for a great writer crucified by history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the early 1930s, Fallada was one of Germany's most popular novelists; his most famous work, (Little Man, What Now?, 1933) was also well-known in the U.S.; his works have since fallen into obscurity. This selection, one of three Fallada works to be published in English this spring, tells the story of Otto and Anna Quangel, a working-class couple who start planting subversive postcards around Berlin after their only son is killed in the war. Sought by the authorities and beset by nosy and opportunistic neighbors, Otto and Anna find the happiest moments of their marriage. But such moments are fleeting: the couple's luck runs out, and they are sent to prison to await their execution. Based on the Gestapo files of a real couple, Fallada's story is powerful and bleak, an anguished lament that resistance is necessary yet futile. Penned in just 24 days, this was Fallada's final work before dying of a morphine overdose; it may also be his most honest memoir of his life under the Nazis.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A SIGNAL literary event of 2009 has occurred, but if publishers had been more vigilant, it could have been a signal literary event in any of the last 60 years. This event is the belated appearance in English of the novel "Every Man Dies Alone," the story of a working-class Berlin couple who took on the Third Reich with a postcard campaign intended to foment rebellion against Hitler's Germany. Published in 1947, the book was written in 24 days by a prolific but psychologically disturbed German writer named Rudolf Ditzen, who spent a significant portion of his life in asylums (for killing a friend in a duel, for threatening his wife with a gun), in prison (for embezzling to finance his morphine habit) and in rehab. In spite of his precarious emotional state, he wrote more than two dozen books under the pen name Hans Fallada, which he took from Grimm's Fairy Tales. Falada was the name the Brothers Grimm gave to a slaughtered horse in the story "The Goose Girl," whose head, nailed on a city gate, speaks to its former mistress, a princess who had been betrayed by her servant The king of the realm, overhearing the talking head, rights the injustice that caused the horse's death. (Fallada added a second "l" to make the name his.) "Hans" he took from the Grimm tale "Hans in Luck," about a man who mistakes his bad luck for good and is contented, let the world jeer as it may. The pen name fulfills its prophecy. Rescued from the grave, from decades of forgetting, this novel, first published just weeks after the author's death, testifies to the lasting value of an intact, if battered, conscience. Fallada's novel takes place in wartime Berlin. Early in 1941, half a year after the French capitulation to Germany, a Gestapo inspector named Escherich stands in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, contemplating a map of the city into which he has stuck 44 red-flagged pins. Each marks a spot where a different inflammatory postcard has been found - "Hetzkarten" that denounce Hitler, hand-written in heavy, clumsy print. The first card reads: "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world." Inspector Escherich's job is to locate and stop the distributor of the cards, using the pins as a chart of his movements. Will the "postcard phantom" be found? Escherich's life depends on it; the brutish Obergruppenführer Prall who oversees his activities makes no mystery of that. A terrified populace ensures that the red-flagged pins will continue to be turned in to the authorities. The "phantom" by necessity must live among other people - in a certain building, on a certain street, in a certain neighborhood - during a time when "half the population is set on locking up the other half" and any unusual (or usual) behavior can be reported by neighbors intent on saving their own skins. Every man may die alone, but nobody lives alone, or entirely unobserved. The "phantom" turns out to be a quiet, cautious, middle-aged couple, Otto and Anna Quangel. The building they live in also houses a timid Jewish grandmother whose husband has been arrested, a bookish judge and a bestial Nazi family. Other characters pass through, from mail carriers, housekeepers and policemen to an opportunistic thug and a whiny drifter, as well as the Quangels' prospective daughter-in-law. Quangel, a taciturn factory foreman, has always kept to himself, using a shield of surliness to ward off any person but his wife, any activity but his work. He has neither joined nor defied the Nazi Party. But when he learns that his only son, who never wanted to be a soldier, has died at the front, Quangel is shaken from his passivity, inspiring the postcard plot. When his wife protests that this resistance is too inconsequential to make a difference, he retorts, "Whether it's big or small, Anna, if they get wind of it, it'll cost us our lives." "He might be right," she concludes. "No one could risk more than his life. Each according to his strength and abilities, but the main thing was, you fought back." THE Otto and Anna Quangel of Fallada's novel are stand-ins for real-life Berliners, Otto and Elise Hampel, a working-class couple who conducted a postcard campaign for more than two years at the height of Hitler's power, after Elise's brother was killed in the war. Arrested in October 1942, they were sentenced to death by the Volksgerichtshof (People's Court) in January 1943 and executed by beheading. Their Gestapo files came into Fallada's hands in the fall of 1945, entrusted to him by a poet and postwar culture official, Johannes Becher, who knew of Fallada's prolific literary output and recognized his gift for objective narration. In a publishing hat trick, Melville House allows English-language readers to sample Fallada's vertiginous variety - and understand Becher's faith in him - by accompanying the release of Michael Hofmann's splendid translation of "Every Man Dies Alone" with the simultaneous publication of excellent English versions of Fallada's two best-known novels, "Little Man - What Now?" (translated by Susan Bennett) and "The Drinker" (translated by Charlotte and A. L. Lloyd). In "Little Man - What Now?" (first published in Germany in 1932), a white-collar salesman named Pinneberg and his working-class bride try to find employment in Berlin, but their fortunes are ruined by the global depression. (Imagine a Horatio Alger novel in which the humble hero fails.) When a policeman bullies Pinneberg - jobless, collarless and nearly pfennigless - as he stares into the window of a fancy delicatessen, he realizes he has fallen off the grid: "He understood that he was on the outside now, that he didn't belong here anymore, and that it was perfectly correct to chase him away. Down the slippery slope, sunk without trace, utterly destroyed." "Little Man - What Now?" became an international hit, translated into more than 20 languages and filmed in both Germany and the United States in the first years of the 1930s. Today its pathos lives on chiefly in the tender song "Kleiner Mann - Was Nun," by a Weimar-era choral group called the Comedian Harmonists, who sang it together onstage until they were banned from performing (a year and a month after the burning of the Reichstag) because half their members were of Jewish descent. In his probing afterword to "Little Man - What Now?" Philip Brady ponders the question of why the book isn't better known today: "Enduring success is one thing, immediate impact is something different, and clearly the immediate impact of Fallada's novel was undeniable." Given our current economic circumstances, the book may have a second chance at impact and endurance. "The Drinker," which Fallada wrote in 1944 while he was locked up in a criminal asylum for attacking his estranged wife, is a memoirish novel in which a country merchant describes his unrepentant, gloating slide into alcoholism and failure. Erwin Sommer, who has come to hate his wife, Magda, for her business acumen, starts drinking himself senseless, takes up with low company, steals the family savings, threatens to kill Magda and is institutionalized. In the asylum, vain and obdurate, he abases himself like a Karamazov, rolling in the muck he has made of his life, yet putting on airs to the end. "You're an easily offended man, Herr Sommer," a doctor tells him. "But I must tell you quite frankly that in your marriage, your wife is the guiding hand, the superior partner." He urges Sommer to let himself "be sheltered and guided" by her. The words infuriate Sommer: "I could not forgive his remarks about Magda's superior efficiency." Fallada's books generally recapitulated his personal history, from "Young Goedeschal: A Novel of Puberty," a youthful effort he later disowned, to "Farmers, Functionaries and Fireworks," a fictionalized account of a conflict between rural workers and greedy authorities in Schleswig-Holstein (he covered the dispute while working as a reporter), to the three novels discussed here. "Every Man Dies Alone" stands above these others, perhaps because so many of the circumstances it enfolds lie outside Fallada's firsthand experience, forcing him to harness his empathy and broaden his focus. And yet the novel he wrote about the Hampels reads less like fiction than like an act of witness: a reincarnation of their world, a posthumous tribute to their sacrifice. But what can be made of the author himself? An enigmatic, complicated figure, Fallada has been the subject of a handful of biographies in German. The fascinating scholarly afterwords contributed to "Little Man - What Now?" by Philip Brady and to "The Drinker" by John Willet retrace the author's life and work, and weigh his contribution. They acknowledge that the critics of Fallada's own era praised him for his "authenticity" and well-drawn characters but questioned his imaginative powers, often dismissing his writing as unpolished or workmanlike - as, in short, an overly literal interpretation of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) that overtook German arts and letters in the 1920s and '30s in revolt against abstraction and expressionism. But at the remove of more than half a century, Fallada's reanimation of the actions, motivations and private terrors of Berliners who are long since dead - leaving a full record of wickedness and, sometimes, goodness - is infused with something else. Call it Alte Sachlichkeit: the reality of another age, restored. According to Brady, the author once admitted that he "could depict only what he saw, not what might happen." What Fallada saw in Berlin in the 1940s was enough to make a weaker man close his eyes. But Fallada kept his open. He was not strong enough to leave Nazi Germany, although he was given the chance. But he was strong enough to record what he saw. "From the minute I sit down and write the first line," he once explained, "I am lost, a compelling force is in command. That force dictates just how and how much I must write, whether I want to or not, even if it makes me ill. ... A hundred times I have wondered what it is that drives me so." It was as if he had no choice. On another occasion, he compared his need to write to an "intoxication," like the morphine he once craved. He called it "a poison that I could not shake out of my mind or my body, I was thirsty for it, I wanted to drink more of it, to drink it always, every day for the rest of my life." The appearance of these three books in English brings to a wider audience the keen vision of a troubled man in troubled times, with more breadth, detail and understanding (if not precisely sympathy) than most other chroniclers of the era have delivered. Perhaps Lucky Hans was stronger than he knew: rich in his misfortunes. To read "Every Man Dies Alone," Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century, is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened." Fallada's novel reads less like fiction than like an act of witness, a posthumous tribute to real-life sacrifice. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Some Bad News The postwoman Eva Kluge slowly climbs the steps of 55 Jablonski Strasse. She's tired from her round, but she also has one of those letters in her bag that she hates to deliver, and is about to have to deliver, to the Quangels, on the second floor. Before that, on the floor below, she has a Party circular for the Persickes. Persicke is some political functionary or other -- Eva Kluge always gets the titles mixed up. At any rate, she has to remember to call out "Heil Hitler!" at the Persickes' and watch her lip. Which she needs to do anyway, there's not many people to whom Eva Kluge can say what she thinks. Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't put children in the world to have them shot. Also, that a home without a man is no good, and for the time being she's got nothing: not her two boys, not a man, not a proper home. So, she has to keep her lip buttoned, and deliver horrible field letters that aren't written but typed, and are signed 'Regimental Adjutant'. She rings the bell at the Persickes', says "Heil Hitler!" and hands the old drunk his circular. He has his party badge on his lapel, and he asks: 'Well, so what's new?' She replies: "Haven't you heard the special report? France has capitulated." Persicke's not content with that. "Come on, Miss, of course I knew that; but to hear you say it, it's like you were selling stale rolls. Say it like it meant something! It's your job to tell everyone who doesn't have a radio, and convince the last of the moaners. The second Blitzkrieg is in the bag now, it's England now! In another three months, the Tommies will be finished, and then we'll see what the Fuhrer has in store for us. Then it'll be the turn of the others to bleed, and we'll be the masters. Come on in, and have a schnapps with us. Amalie, Erna, August, Adolf, Baldur -- let's be having you. Today we're celebrating, we're not working today. Today we'll wet the news, and in the afternoon we'll go and pay a call on the Jewish lady on the fourth floor, and see if she won't treat us to coffee and cake! I tell you, there'll be no mercy for that bitch any more!" While Mr. Persicke, ringed by his family launches into increasingly wild vituperative and starts hitting the schnapps, the postie has climbed another flight of stairs and rung the Quangels' bell. She's already holding the letter out in her hand, ready to run off the second she's handed it over. And she's in luck: it's not the woman who answers the door -- she usually likes to exchange a few pleasantries -- but the man with the etched, birdlike face, the thin lips, and the cold eyes. He takes the letter out of her hand without a word and pushes the door shut in her face, as if she was a thief, someone you had to be on your guard against. Eva Kluge shrugs her shoulders and turns to go back downstairs. Some people are like that; in all the time she's delivered mail in the Jablonski Strasse, that man has yet to say a single word to her. Well, let him be, she can't change him, she couldn't even change the man she's married to, who wastes his money sitting in bars and betting on horses, and only ever shows his face at home when he's skint. At the Persickes' they've left the apartment door open, she can hear the glasses and the rowdy celebrations. The postwoman gently pulls the door shut and carries on downstairs. She thinks the speedy victory over France might actually be good news, because it will have brought the end of the war nearer. And then she'll have her two boys back. The only fly in the ointment is the uncomfortable realization that people like the Persickes will come out on top. To have the likes of them as masters and always have to mind your p's and q's, that doesn't strike her as right either. Briefly she thinks of the man with the bird face who she gave the field post letter to, and she thinks of old Mrs. Rosenthal up on the fourth floor, whose husband the Gestapo took away two weeks ago. You had to feel sorry for someone like that. The Rosenthals used to have a little haberdashery shop on Prenzlauer Allee. That was Aryanized, and now the man's disappeared, and he can't be far short of seventy. Those two old people can't have done any harm to anyone, they always allowed credit -- they did it for Eva Kluge too when she couldn't afford new clothes for the kids -- and the goods were certainly no dearer or worse in quality than elsewhere. No, Eva Kluge can't get it into her head that a man like Rosenthal is any worse than the Persickes, just by virtue of him being a Jew. And now the old woman is sitting in her flat all alone, and doesn't dare go outside. It's only after dark that she goes and does her shopping with her yellow star, probably she's hungry. No, thinks Eva Kluge, even if we defeat France ten times over, it doesn't mean there's any justice here at home... And by now she's reached the next house, and she makes her deliveries there. In the meantime shop foreman Otto Quangel has taken the field post letter into the parlor and propped it against the sewing machine. "There!" he says, nothing more. He always leaves the letters for his wife to open, knowing how devoted she is to their only son Otto. Now he stands facing her, biting his thin under lip, waiting for her smile to light up. In his quiet, undemonstrative way, he loves this woman very much. She has torn open the envelope, for a brief moment there really was a smile lighting up her face, and then it vanished when she saw the typed letter. Her face grew apprehensive, she read more and more slowly, as though afraid of what each next word might be. The man has leaned forward and taken his hands out of his pockets. He is biting his underlip quite hard now, he senses something terrible has happened. It's perfectly silent in their parlor. Only now does the woman's breathing come with a gasp. Suddenly she emits a soft scream, a sound her husband has never heard from her. Her head rolls forward, bangs against the spools of thread on her sewing machine, and comes to rest among the folds of sewing, covering the fateful letter. In a couple of bounds Quangel is at her side. With uncharacteristic haste he places his big, work-toughened hand on her back. He can feel his wife trembling all over. "Anna!" he says, "Anna, please!" He waits for a moment, and then he says it: "Has something happened to Otto? Is he wounded, is it bad?" His wife's body continues to tremble, her mouth doesn't make a sound. She makes no effort to raise her head to look at him. He looks down at her hair, it's gotten thin in the many years of their marriage. They are getting old; if something serious has happened to Otto, she will have no one to love, only him, and there's not much to love about him. He doesn't have words to tell her ever how much he feels for her. Even now he's not able to stroke her, be tender to her, comfort her a little. It's all he can do to rest his heavy hand on her hair, pull her head up as gently as he can, and softly say: "Anna, will you tell me what's in the letter?" But even though her eyes are now very near to his, she keeps them shut tight, she won't look at him. Her face is a sickly yellow, her usual healthy color is gone. The flesh over her bones seems to have melted away, it's like looking at a skull. Only her cheeks and mouth continue to tremble, as her whole body trembles, caught up in some mysterious inner quake. As Quangel gazes into this so familiar, and now so strange face, as he feels his heart pounding harder and harder, as he feels his complete inability to afford her the least comfort, he is gripped by a deep fear. A ridiculous fear really, compared to the deep pain of his wife, but he is afraid that she might start to scream, scream louder and wilder than she did a moment ago. He was always one for peace and quiet, he didn't want anyone to know anything about the Quangels at home. And as for giving vent to feelings: no, thank you! But even in the grip of his fear, the man isn't able to say any more than he did a moment ago: "What is it in the letter? Tell me, Anna!" The letter is lying there plain to see, but he doesn't dare to reach for it. He would have to let go his wife's head, and he knows that this head -- there are two bloody welts on it from the sewing machine -- would only slump once more. He masters himself, asks again: "What's happened with Ottochen?" It's as though the pet name, one that the man hardly ever used, recalled the woman from the world of her pain back into life. She gulps a couple of times, she even opens her eyes, which are very blue, and now look bled white. "With Ottochen?" she says in a near whisper. "What do you think's happened? Nothing has happened, there is no Ottochen any more, that's all!" "Oh!' the man says, just a deep "Oh!" from the core of his heart. Without knowing what he's doing, he's let go his wife's head, and has reached for the letter. His eyes stare at the lines, without being able to decipher them. Thereupon the woman grabs the letter from him. Her mood has swung round, furiously she rips the piece of paper into scraps and shreds and fragments, and she shouts into his face: "What do you even want to read that filth for, those common lies they always write? That he died a hero's death for Fuhrer and Fatherland? That he was an exemplary soldier and comrade? Do you want to hear that from them, when you know yourself that Ottochen liked nothing better than fiddling about with his radio kits, and that he cried when he was called away to be a soldier? How often he used to say to me when he was recruited that he would give his right hand to be able to get away from them? And now he's supposed to be an exemplary soldier, and died a hero's death? Lies, all a pack of lies! But that's what you get from your wretched war, you and that Fuhrer of yours!" Now she's standing in front of him, the woman, so much shorter than he is, but with eyes sparkling with fury. "Me and my Fuhrer?" he mumbles, stunned by this attack. "Since when is he my Fuhrer? I'm not even in the Party, just in the Arbeitsfront (*), and everyone has to join that. As for voting for him, I only did that once, and so did you." He says it in his slow and cumbersome manner, not so much to defend himself as to clarify the facts. He still can't understand what induced her to mount this sudden attack on him. They were always of one mind... But she says heatedly: "What gives you the right to be the man in the house and determine everything? If I want so much as a space for my potatoes in the cellar, it has to be the way you want it. And in something as important as this, it's you who made the wrong decision. But then you creep around everywhere in carpet slippers, you want your peace and quiet and that's all, and not come to anyone's attention. So you did the same as they all did, and when they yelled: 'Fuhrer, give us your orders, we will obey!' you went with them like a sheep. And the rest of us had to follow you! But now Ottochen's dead, and no Fuhrer in the world can bring him back, and nor can you!" He listened to her without saying a word back. He had never been a man for quarrel and argy-bargy, and he could also tell that it was her pain speaking in her. He was almost glad to have her scolding him, because it meant she wasn't giving in to her grief. The only thing he said by way of reply was: "One of us will have to tell Trudel." Trudel was Ottochen's girlfriend, almost his fiancÈe; she called them Mother and Father. She often dropped in on them for a chat in the evening, even now, with Ottochen away. By day she worked in a uniform factory. The mention of Trudel straightaway set Anna Quangel off on a different track. She glanced at the gleaming clock on the mantel, and asked: "Will you have time before your shift?" "I'm on from one till eleven today," he replied. "I've got time." "Good," she said. "Then go, but just ask her to come. Don't say anything about Ottochen. I'll tell her myself. Your dinner'll be ready by midday." "Then I'll go and ask her to come round tonight," he said, but he didn't leave yet, but looked in her jaundiced, ill-looking face. She looked back at him, and for a moment they looked at each other, two people who had been married for almost thirty years, always harmoniously, he quiet and silent, she bringing a bit of life to the place. But however much they now looked at each other, they still had no words to say about this thing that had happened, and so he nodded and went out. She heard the apartment door close. And no sooner was she certain he was gone than she turned back towards the sewing machine, and swept up the scraps of the fateful field post letter. She tried to put them back together, but quickly saw that it would take too long now, and above all she had to get the dinner ready. So she scooped the pieces into the envelope, and slid it inside her hymnbook. In the afternoon, when Otto was at work, she would have time to fit the pieces together and glue them down. It might all be lies, mean, stupid lies, but it remained the last news she would have had of Ottochen. She would keep it safe, and show it to Trudel. Maybe she would be able to cry then; at the moment it still felt like a flame in her heart. It would do her good to be able to cry! She shook her head crossly and went to the stove. Excerpted from Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
